Free Web NovelChapter 60: Moonborn Unleashed
~LYRA’S POV~
I didn’t move.
The battle was still happening around me, I could hear it, could feel the ground vibrating with it, could feel the bond with Ryland and Eren both burning with urgency at the edges of my awareness. The field was still full of Selara’s wolves. The blood moon was still blazing overhead. Everything that had been true thirty seconds ago was still true.
And I was kneeling on the ground with Kael’s head in my lap and I couldn’t make myself move.
The grief came in all at once, the way a wall came down, not gradually, not in pieces, but completely, filling every available space instantly. There was no room in it for anything else. Not strategy. Not the power still burning on my arms. Not the sound of Ryland’s voice somewhere behind me, not Eren’s presence at the edge of my peripheral. Just this. Just the weight of his head in my lap and his hand that had found mine and had gone still, and everything that had been building between us for months that had managed to exist in the same space as all the complicated history of us.
Even when I was too stupid to say it right. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ
The words were inside me now and they weren’t going anywhere.
I looked at his face. At the particular stillness of it, Kael, who was never still, who was always calculating or containing or managing something, finally and completely still in a way that had nothing to do with control.
Selara’s voice came through the grief like something slipping through a gap.
"This is the moment I’ve been waiting for," she said.
I didn’t look up yet.
"Grief and power together." Her voice had the quality of someone describing something they’d been anticipating for a long time and had finally arrived at.
"That’s when the Moonborn is most open. Most accessible." A pause. "The power bleeds when you grieve. Did you know that? I can feel it from here."
I looked up.
She was standing ten feet away. Her expression wasn’t cruel, it was almost satisfied in a way that was worse than cruelty, the satisfaction of someone watching a process they had set in motion arriving at its intended conclusion. She was already reaching, I could feel it, the same dark pull she’d been using all night to absorb the Moonborn light, except stronger now, aimed more directly, taking advantage of the grief the way she’d said she would.
She was reaching for me.
And the power was, responding. Not the way I wanted it to respond. The way she wanted it to. The grief had cracked something open, some last remaining seal on the part of the power I’d been protecting even in the moment of release, and the light was starting to bleed outward, uncontrolled, uncontained, exactly the kind of release she could absorb.
I felt it happening and I felt her pulling at it and for three seconds I let it, let it bleed, let her reach, let the grief have the space it was demanding.
And then I made a decision.
Not with my head. Somewhere deeper than that. The part of me that had been on a cold floor in Shadowfang and had chosen to get up. The part that had run through a dark forest with nothing but a knife and a piece of bread. The part that had stood in front of three hundred wolves the night before and said come home.
The part that had Kael’s last words sitting in the centre of it and was not going to let them be the thing that ended this.
I took the grief and I didn’t put it down. You couldn’t put something like that down. I took it and I brought it in, all the way in, and let it be exactly as large as it was, and then I used it.
Not the way Selara expected. Not the bleeding, uncontrolled outpouring she’d been waiting for.
I chose it. Deliberately. Consciously. Every piece of it aimed at one specific target.
The silver light that came out of me this time was different from everything that had come before it.
It wasn’t the warm glow of the training fields or the careful pulse of controlled release. It wasn’t even the blazing eruption from the middle of the battle. It was something I didn’t have a word for, the light of something that had lost what it was trying to protect and had nothing left to hold any part of itself back for.
It was blinding.
I felt Ryland shield his eyes from somewhere behind me without being able to see him. I felt Eren drop to one knee, bracing against the pressure of it the way you braced against a physical force. Every wolf on the field, ours and hers, was knocked off their feet by the sheer weight of it, stumbling or falling, the soul-tethered wolves going down all at once like cut strings.
Selara’s expression shattered into something she hadn’t shown me yet.
Not fear. Not the fear from before, the small, controlled, almost-concealed thing I’d seen through the glass of her composure.
Something rawer. Something that understood, in real time, that the calculation had been wrong.
She reached for the power anyway. Old instinct, centuries of reflexive absorption, her hands going up and the dark energy swirling outward to pull at the silver light the way it had been pulling all night.
It didn’t work.
She reached and found nothing she could take. Not because the power wasn’t there, it was there, enormous, more of it than anything she’d tried to absorb all night. But it wasn’t bleeding and it wasn’t leaking and it wasn’t uncontrolled. Every piece of it was aimed and intended and chosen, and you couldn’t absorb something that was moving that fast directly at you.
"Yes!" she screamed. The triumph in it was wild, and wrong, and already fading at the edges as she registered that the absorption wasn’t working. "That’s it! Give it to me!"
"I’m not giving you anything," I said.
The silver flames hit her.
Not a wave. Not a pulse. A sustained, directed release, everything the dam had been holding, everything the faucet had been managing, every fraction she’d been absorbing all night returned at full force in a single direction at a single target. It hit her the way a wave hit a cliff. Not going around. Going through.
She staggered.
The dark energy she’d been carrying, stolen power, hoarded fragments, absorbed Moonborn light, ignited on contact with the silver fire. It didn’t hold. It couldn’t hold. What she’d been carrying wasn’t hers and it had never been hers and the Moonborn light knew the difference.
She burned.
Not slowly. Not with the lingering quality of something that had lived a long time and was reluctant to finish. Quickly, completely, the way darkness burned when it finally met the light it had been running from, all at once, total, with a sound that wasn’t pain and wasn’t words. It was something older than either. Something that had been waiting to be released and was done.
The silver flames held for a moment longer than they needed to.
Then they faded.
And Selara was gone.
Not fallen. Not wounded and lying on the ground. Gone, ash dispersed energy and three centuries of borrowed power returned to the Goddess who had never stopped owning it, however long it had been spent in the dark.
The clearing was silent.
I became aware of my own breathing. Of my knees on the ground. Of the weight in my lap that I couldn’t look at yet and the hand that was still tangled with mine.
Above us, slowly, with the particular quality of something that had been held for too long and was finally releasing, the blood moon began to change.
The red drained out of it. Not dramatically, the way colour left something gradually, the way morning arrived before you noticed it was morning. White moved in from the edges and spread inward, and the light that came down through it was clean and silver and entirely ordinary.
The blood moon turned white.
The battle around us had already stopped. The soul-tethered wolves had gone still the moment Selara’s power left the field, dropping where they stood, the binding that had replaced their consciousness dissolving with its source. The Shadowfang, Silverclaw, and Moonveil wolves stood in the clearing that had been a battlefield, and the quiet that came after was the kind of quiet that only existed after something very large had ended.
I didn’t move.
I held what I was holding, and I let the white moonlight come down, staying exactly where I was.
